


Necrocafé

by etothey



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Happy Ending, Happy undead skeletal creatures, Necromancy, Pets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:00:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27944207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/etothey
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus isn't sure which confounds her more: the new boxes of bones she is to animate, or the hot redheaded courier who brings the boxes.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 2
Kudos: 40
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Necrocafé

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RSolya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RSolya/gifts).



Harrow was bent over her workbench carefully moving the tiny bones of a cat's inner ear with tweezers when there came a knock on the door. "Come in," she called without looking up. She didn't recognize the particular heavy thuds, three fast and one short.

The door swung open, kicked, no doubt, and a tall, muscular, redheaded woman strode in. "New delivery," she said without preamble. Snow whirled in through the entrance before the delivery woman toed the door shut with a definitive bang.

"Yes, I can see that," Harrow snapped, her concentration disturbed not by the arrival of another box but by the woman's disconcerting nearness. Up close, she had startling golden eyes, as hot as summer sunshine. _Impressive musculature,_ her brain noted unhelpfully; the woman had already set down the box with startling care and pulled off her black leather duster. When Harrow suppressed the urge to check out the other woman's arms--seriously, who went around in a tank top, even under a jacket, in the dead of winter?--the same snide corner of her brain added, _If her hair became any redder, you could heat the building with it._

"I'm Gideon Nav," the woman said, as if this mattered. She was grinning broadly at Harrow, looking her up and down with honest appraisal. "You're Harrowhark Nonagesimus, right? _The_ best necromancer working for Necrocafé? Do you really love your work so much that you sleep in the office?" She followed this up with a wink.

Harrow stiffened, despite the answering rush of heat in her loins, and turned her attention to the box without responding to the question, or the implied flirtation. It was larger than the usual, perhaps a meter and a half in all directions, although Harrow knew from long experience that most of the volume was padding to prevent damage to the precious contents. She sent her necromantic senses questing within and was surprised by the sense of great age that came to her.

Meanwhile, the last cat Harrow had animated clattered up to Gideon and attempted to wind around her ankles in true cattish fashion. Green lights lit the dark sockets in its carefully-repaired skull. It purred as it rubbed its skeletal body up against Gideon's boots, its spectral voice bringing with it just a hint of cold wind.

Gideon sat down on her haunches and ran her fingers lovingly over the bone-kitty's spine. The cat arched under her touch and redoubled its efforts purring. Gideon's assessing gaze moved to the workbench. "You're working on another cat?" she asked.

"Yes," Harrow said curtly. "From the last box." It had contained the two cats' bones, so badly commingled and mauled that she'd spent a hard two weeks separating them into two piles before she could even begin animating the more intact one. "I'm almost done with her brother."

"She's very friendly," Gideon said, as if this weren't obvious.

Harrow shrugged. "Enjoying another one of her nine lives, I suppose."

Gideon seemed undeterred by Harrow's lack of friendliness. "I've got two more boxes of this stuff, and then I'm off-shift," she said, as if Harrow could possibly have cared about a delivery woman's schedule. "Want I should get you a coffee?"

"I don't drink coffee," Harrow said. She had almost completed the assembly of the second skeleton. She knew that the current bone-cat would be happier with company.

Gideon sighed and shrugged her duster back on, not coincidentally giving Harrow an excellent display of her physique. How on earth did the woman maintain a tan in this weather? Granted, her job did presumably involve a lot of outdoors work. Harrow had never thought about the delivery people and their lives, until now. She was surprised to find herself equal parts intrigued and put off by the delivery woman's forthrightness.

By the time she set down her tweezers--she was proud of how steady her hands were, even after six straight hours of this--and looked up to essay a conversational gambit, Gideon had already made her way to the door and departed. Harrow could have called after her, but an ossified sort of dignity held her fast, and then Gideon was gone.

*

Harrow's stubbornness held true for the next delivery, and the next. Gideon, finally rebuffed by her reserve, was civil but not actively flirtatious thereafter. Harrow cursed herself for her inability to capitalize on a prime opportunity. It wasn't as if a necromancer in the employ of Necrocafé had many social outlets.

Most people shied from Harrow's job when she brought it up in conversation. Not, granted, that there was much conversation to be had in this city. Harrow knew what they said of her, on those occasions that she ventured out to restock on the pallid broths, snow leeks, and distilled bottled water that she subsisted on. _Weird. Witchy. Would rather hang out with dead animals than living people._

And if so, what of it? The dead animals never did her ill. She only spent a little time with them before they made their way to their forever homes. The necrocafés doubled as adoption centers for people wanting a pet, and in this city, at least, demand outstripped supply. She knew by now not to name them. Even the one bone-cat she had kept for the better part of a year on account of its tricky necromantic instability, playful little Ossifer, eventually left her for a permanent home. Better not to get too attached.

The two most recent bone-cats only spent a week in Necrocafé Ninth before a family adopted both of them. Harrow had been sent a picture of them curled up by the fireplace, snuggling with a pair of smiling tow-headed children. Never mind that skeletal cats weren't precisely cuddly; they were affectionate and playful. The same with the dogs, the finches, the gerbils. Harrow was as gentle and sweet with them as she was crabby and impatient with her own kind and maybe, also, a certain attractive redhead.

Harrow spent the rest of her time preoccupied by the three boxes of complicated bones that Gideon had brought her. _Take the time you need,_ her supervisor's note said. _An unusual find._

With characteristic patience, Harrow had read through the accompanying paperwork. Old bones, possibly fossils. Upstairs management thought it had the potential to draw even bigger crowds to the most fabulous of their establishments, Necrocafé First. Harrow didn't know who they'd bribed in order to site it right across from Canaan House, but Harrow had seen the figures and knew it was a profitable location.

But for all that to come to fruition, Harrow had to put together the bones and animate them. Which was difficult when she didn't even know for sure what the creature was.

Oh--she could make some educated guesses. A vertebra was a vertebra. By listening to the bones' murmurations, she could figure out what order they went in. The rest of the reconstruction was careful, painstaking piecework of the sort that she, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, excelled in.

Even if she couldn't manage to untie her tongue long enough to go on a date.

*

Harrow had made what she hoped was the final necessary breakthrough when she heard Gideon knocking on the door again. "Come in," she said as she nudged a bone chip into place. This was time-sensitive work: the necromantic adhesive that she used had a tendency to dry up and turn gunky if you blinked too long. She cursed herself for sounding so, well, unapproachable, but she really couldn't afford to mess this up. "Just set it down--"

Cold wind gusted into the workshop, bringing with it a kiss of snowflakes. Harrow heard the door easing shut, more gently than usual. _So maybe she's learned manners,_ Harrow thought, unable to tamp down on her habitual prickliness. She'd become uncomfortably aware in the past lonely weeks that the derision with which she greeted other people in general and Gideon in particular was a shield for her own heart. There was nothing like sweet, affectionate bone-critters and their need for TLC to make one aware of one's shortcomings.

"Is that you, Gideon?" Harrow demanded, because having someone behind her made her waspish.

"Do your work, Harrow," Gideon returned. "Pretend I'm not here."

 _That's impossible,_ Harrow almost snapped. She was grateful that she managed to curb her tongue in time. "Watch, then," she said, and her voice softened in spite of herself. "This one's special."

"Everything you do is special," Gideon murmured in a voice that was almost downright sultry.

 _I must have misheard that,_ Harrow told herself. Her palms were starting to sweat. She worked ungloved, like any proper necromancer--bones were _personal_ \--but she couldn't afford a slip, either. So she reached for the glob of rosin.

Harrow might be a disaster at dating, but she knew her bones. Piece by piece she had unpuzzled the mysterious boxes' contents, spread them in proper order over her workbench, rigged stands of wood and wire to hold the pieces in place. Every bone had been restored from the fragments available; where there were holes and pocks and fractures, Harrow had effected repairs with an osseo-matrix that simulated the real thing.

"Live," she breathed, and the bones heaved themselves up and snapped to, like a sail unfurling in full wind.

The dragon--for that was what it was--loomed over them, soft blue lights burning in its eye sockets. It heaved itself up, and opened its jaws. Snow flurried out, the very breath of winter incarnate.

Harrow was painfully aware of Gideon's delighted laughter.

"That's the first time one of your creatures has breathed snow," Gideon said. She was grinning, her amber eyes sparkling with delight.

The dragon stepped down from the workbench and onto the floor, its head swinging back and forth as it took in its surroundings. It huffed a few snowflakes, one of which landed ticklingly on Harrow's nose, then nuzzled her. Harrow didn't smile or laugh, but she did pet the dragon's skull fondly.

The dragon then turned its attention to Gideon, butting its head against her chest. Harrow blushed. She couldn't help but be aware of Gideon's trim, strong figure, the assured way she held herself, that shock of red hair.

"There's rosin all over my hands," Harrow blurted out. It was manifestly not what she'd intended to say. Harrowhark Nonagesimus, elite necromancer, should have said something suave and maybe a little disdainful.

Gideon's grin only became wider. "I see worse in my job," she said. "Want me to show you?"

"In front of the dragon?"

Gideon nodded vigorously. "I have all sorts of plans for the corruption of the undead," she declared. She proceeded to pull her tank top up over her head.

Harrow's mouth went dry. Gideon's muscles played fascinatingly beneath her skin with every motion. It was also quite obvious from those hard, pointed nipples that Gideon was, how to say it, _ready for action_.

"Corruption of the undead," she said, her voice trembling only a little, "or the living?"

Gideon's entire face lit up. She could have been one of those shining electric holiday decorations that they put up in front of Canaan House in honor of the Necrolord Prime. "I thought you'd never ask," she purred. "Let's see if I can get you to come before I do."

"Are you _challenging me_?" Harrow demanded, drawing herself up to her not-very height.

Or she would have, if Gideon hadn't drawn her close and kissed her so ferociously that the last word came out as a moan.

*

Much later, spread out on the work bench that Gideon had enthusiastically cleared for their gyrations, Harrow stirred in Gideon's arms and saw, to her disconcertment, a pair of glowing blue eyes regarding them benevolently.

"Oh, stop that," Harrow muttered. "You used to be alive, too."

The dragon only smiled--how did it do that?--and breathed a ticklement of snowflakes all over her and Gideon's naked forms: a winter's blessing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Cyphomandra for the beta.


End file.
